Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Most importantly, she's the mother of your children

If you marry an under-30 woman, the day will come, ostensibly, that she’ll be your over-30 wife. But you’ll have something that chagrined men who married women on the cusp of sagging cups don’t have: Years of very fond, very monopolized, very supple memories. If you maritally snag a 21-year-old minx and occupy her sugar walls for the next ten years, the spermatomically bonded cervix-splattered glue of all those splendid tumbles of passion accrue into something larger than the sum of your individuated speckles.

It's as close to celebrating the benefits of monogamy as one should ever hope to get from the silver tongue. In its focus on carnality, however, it misses a piece of the marital equation that is of crucial importance to many men of this primate species with a rather unusual trait in the animal kingdom: Paternal investment. Like so many other behaviors that carry with them evolutionary benefits, the underlying biological drive is expressed a uniquely pleasurable part of a man's human experience. As cliched as it may sound, there really is no feeling in the world like rocking your son to sleep after he has collapsed into your lap.

Marry a woman in her thirties or forties, and there's a good chance the two of you won't have any kids together (even worse if she's bringing offspring from a previous relationship into the mix and you're not). As she wilts, sags, and tires over the years, well, that fat, flat shadow of her former self is all you're left with. Marry her in her teens or early twenties, though, and not only do you get to accrue all the benefits Heartiste discusses, but the two of you have ample time to create a brood together. The feelings you have for your children (assuming an average or high level of desire for paternal nurturing--this doesn't apply so much to men on the lower end of that spectrum) will splash all over her, too. She is the only person on the planet who has a stronger attachment to your children than you do. Your love for them will perpetually reinforce the attachment you have to her as the bond is weathered relentlessly by the passage of time and its nasty companion, senescence.

28 comments:

Anonymous
said...

All things being equal, almost any male would prefer a younger female as a life companion. However, I think it is, for lack of a better word, bestial to focus excessively on such a component. Age is but one factor of many, albeit an very important one.

I'm not convinced that procreation between a man and a woman necessarily fortifies their relationship. Yes, it can serve as the ultimate representation of their bond (in more ways than one, at least until the child turns 18), but it isn't likely to bring about any fundamental shift in their mutual affection for each other.

I noticed that Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner both married young (21-22) to girls they had known from before they were rich baseball players.

Back in the day the poor could not marry young but the royals and nobility could. Some former US presidents married teen girls. These were not lower class people. But back then everyone realized that the single most attractive feminine feature is youth. So, there was no point in waiting for marriage.

I read the Huffington Post article, and it looked pretty clear that the reason why couples with children are less likely to divorce is not because they love each other more. There were a variety of reasons: custody, not wanting the kids to have a broken home, harder finances, frustration from infertility, ect. There are many reasons for a couple with children to stay married even if they do not love each other. There is not much point if you are childfree.

From experience, I can say that my love for my kids was entirely separate from my love for my wife. My love for my kids (which is the most love I have ever felt) did not flow over back to her, and she certainly did not love me more after we had kids. I am now divorced, and love the kids as much as ever.

We have three happy, healthy little boys. And you're right: there is no better feeling - no physical, spiritual, emotional, or professional reward in this world that I enjoy more than watching my little guys grow up and experience the world.

My wife is 30 now. I realize her best years are behind her. But I frankly can't imagine doing anything that would disrupt the little family unit we've created, and the protection it provides to my boys.

You provide a false dichotomy. MRAs are telling men to marry girls 18-25. Feminists are telling men to marry women 30+. You present the issue as if men are not allowed to marry women 25-29. MRAs deny facts just as much as feminists do. The fact is, a woman is less likely to frivorce you if she marries you when she 25 or older. So why not marry a 25 year old, as that is the youngest age at which a women has a low chance of frivorcing you?

I don't want to put the cart too far in front of the horse. Truthfully, we want to have at least three kids.

Anon,

I was responding to Heartiste's post. My intuition is that early- to mid-twenties is ideal, but all these sorts of characteristics are generally suggestive, not set in stone. While later marriages face less risk of divorce (though I wonder if that's the case after SES/education/IQ is controlled for), I'd bet every penny I'm worth that my wife will never even consider divorce. Yeah, I know I'm walking right into "Well, you've already made that bet, etc etc", heh.

A person's intuitions does not constitute fact. Feminists rely on their intuitions, and it has been disastrous for society to listen to feminists (Example: when feminists make up rape statistics that are false). Likewise, MRAs also rely on their intuitions. You see a lot of people on heartiste suggesting that IQ 125 women with bachelor's degrees who are 25 years old are the worst women to marry, while IQ 80 women who dropped outta high school who are 18 years old make ideal wives. The statistics show that a woman who is 25 or older has the lowest likelihood of frivorcing her husband. Finding a wife should be an optimisation problem. 25 is the optimum age because frivorce risk goes down from age 18 to 25, but does not go down significantly after age 25.

"As cliched as it may sound, there really is no feeling in the world like rocking your son to sleep after he has collapsed into your lap."

I can testify to that.

In my case, however, one of the most amazing experiences I had is this one time with my young son, back when he was much younger than the 11 months he is now. This was long before he was the highly expressive, chock-full of personality child he is today, but was just beginning to respond to his environment. I picked him up from the bouncer toy he was in and brought him to me, and seemingly out of nowhere, as he looked at me, his face lit up and he smiled at me – for the first time. I like to think he was happy to see his dad. There's really no words to describe my feeling at that moment.

You're creating a false dichotomy (or others are). There are some pretty strange things Heartiste's commenters put out there, but that's a partly a consequence of having so damned many, and Heartiste himself is quite sane. I don't subscribe to everything in those varied sets of worldviews.

How are you going to be able to pass on any wealth to 6 kids? You may be averse to inherited wealth, but I think it will be very important in the future because there will be so few opportunities for human advancement in an increasingly automated economy. Wealth brings both stability and status. Please don't leave your kids without it.

Jayman, Audacious: yeah. I remember how happy I was when I was making puppet theatre for my daughter, who could not talk at this point and barely could sit. To this day I remember this surge of happiness when my daughter laughed so hard that she fell down from sitting position to lyign position, and was still laughing.

"How are you going to be able to pass on any wealth to 6 kids? You may be averse to inherited wealth, but I think it will be very important in the future because there will be so few opportunities for human advancement in an increasingly automated economy."

I am not poor. But then, I could not give a major inheritance to six. But I believe I'll be able to educate everyone fully, even without financial aid.

If our automated utopia arrives, wealth per capita would be high and people would be okay.

If something gets in the way of our automated utopia (social dysfunction) then the need for skilled people will be considerable.

Technology is not the cause of unemployment. Surly, unskilled people and red tape is. Japan, which is way more techy and automated than the US, has an unemployment rate of just 3.6 percent.

If you had to select a wife randomly, I guess 25 would be optimum based on that data. But nobody, least all anyone who is alt-right/MRA/whatever is searching randomly. You search for youth and ideology.

When people say that younger women are better, that's just saying the emperor has no clothes. It doesn't mean that all young women are worth marrying. Most aren't.

Epigone, as far as handling more kids goes, it is important and righteous for grandparents to play a supporting role with childcare and whatever else they can help with especially as numbers grow.

Building a clan is a multigenerational project, and grandparents should be knowingly in on the project, buying in to the plan as their own also. We should not be islands. This should be your project and theirs. This is not strange thinking: it is the normal mode of all our ancestors and most of human history. May the force be with you!

There are other factors beside technology involved in the poor employment figures for Greece, South Africa and Zimbabwe. I'd say the verdict is still out on what the impact of automation will be because we are still on the cusp of implementation. Self-driving cars, factories with almost no human workers, and automation of middle class office jobs might significantly raise unemployment. There won't be enough need for robot technicians to employ the millions who are displaced, many of whom will not have the aptitudes required for that job anyway.

Since we're sharing touching moments, we'd just taken his six month picture and I hadn't shaved over the weekend. I tickled his belly with my scruff and out game this deep belly laugh that melted my heart.

Dissident,

Well put. Seems obvious but worth stating explicitly.

Dan,

Yes. You've made the point before, and I can appreciate it even more now. Fortunately we have both sets of grandparents within 15 minutes and both are always eager to help out.

although I have MRA type views, I think marrying an older girl is better in the sense that she is more mature and you can still have kids. How old was Megyn Kelly, for instance, when she had her first kid?